National Women’s Commission is Now a Statutory Body

Dolores Balderamos-Garcia

The National Women’s Commission is now a statutory body, following Cabinet’s approval to empower the working group to legally address gender issues and to coordinate all national efforts relating to gender equality, equity and women’s empowerment.  According to Minister of Human Development Dolores Balderamos-Garcia, the move to give authority to the National Women’s Commission was overdue.

On the phone: Dolores Balderamos-Garcia, Minister of Human Development

“It means a lot. We believe that this really has been an oversight that has occurred for a long, long time and really, it is time that we correct it.  As you may know, the National Commission for Families and Children is a statutory body under the Families and Children’s Act and so we have the NCFC already incorporated as a statutory body.  But it was an oversight, I believe, that we didn’t make the National Women’s Commission also a statutory body.  We believe that making the NWC a statutory body will really do us a lot of good because the NWC really acts like a clearinghouse for all matters related to the empowerment of women and gender advancement and equality.  We rely on the goodwill of partners to report to us, in other words, we don’t have the teeth at the moment to say to people, “look, we are the clearinghouse, get back to us because we are the body that is responsible to report to the United Nations on the CDAW Convention.  As you know, the CDAW Convention is the convention to eliminate all forms of discrimination against women and we believe that if we would have the legal mandate and the teeth to ask our partners to report so that we can then fulfill our treaty obligations in reporting then we believe that that will be much, much better.  As a matter of fact, Belize has not reported on the CDAW convention for, I think, ten years, since 2012 and that is a terrible oversight that we must correct.  So that’s one thing, but then secondly, having the NWC as a statutory body, it will be able to stand on its own a little bit more and be able to do fundraising that is needed on their own.  Now that doesn’t mean that they will be abandoned by our Ministry of Human Development.  It comes definitely under our umbrella and we will continue to work very closely with the commission.”